Nice writing style Jake
It is quite difficult to put your thoughts into words & get someone to understand what you trying to say..
i don't have a full frame camera so can't really tell if the dynamic range of my D7k & D5.1k are a lot lower than the D800.
However with my limited experience, i personally like both.. i couldn't pick one over another for every moment cos some shots just NEED the HDR effect
but HDR does lose
some quality in the final image imo, so some shots need the dynamic range of a single pic..
How much you "lose quality" when doing HDR processing has a lot to do with the experience of the person doing the processing and the software they're using. I'm interested to see some of the differences in the treatment of the 3 images I posted in the other thread, though I have to say I wish I'd perhaps dug a little deeper and picked something taken with the 18-105mm and not the 8-16mm Sigma since there's some natural distortion on some of the edges (alas, since it's IR converted, I couldn't shoot something new). From here I would hold up someone like DaveW as an artist who
knows how to shoot and process in HDR, and it's rare that I don't drop my jaw when I see his HDR work. But I know what you're saying, because there are times in my own HDR work where it just won't get to where I want/need it to go and it gets tossed.
As for Dynamic Range measurements, according to DxOMark, while the D800 (and D610) sit at the top of the heap with a measured DR of 14.4EV's, your D7000 isn't far behind at 13.9EV's, which is actually better than it's replacement likely due to the pixel size being slightly larger. And while DR is important, that's only one component of sensor quality, which is why the D7000 may range 5th in terms of DR, but 12th overall among Nikon cameras in their database.
The truth is that most modern Nikons can easily stand a +/-2EV tweak to an exposure with little issue. An easy test is to take a shot in a controled environment (no lighting change) with a proper exposure and then take a series of identical shots varying the exposure compensation 1 EV at a time, up and down (or whatever increment you'd like). Then take them into LR/ACR and add/subtract back the EV using the Exposure slider. The point at which you can notice a difference in the adjusted photo when compared to the original is the point at which you've stretched your sensor beyond its full dynamic range ability. That's not to say that you couldn't still use those shots, tweaking and fixing as necessary, but it does mean that you've lost light information of some kind.
